


That Time Forgot

by CloudDreamer



Series: Demon Eyes [10]
Category: Dr Carmilla (Musician), The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Immortality, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:13:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23652151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudDreamer/pseuds/CloudDreamer
Summary: This is what she gets to keep. She loses everything else to the years.Title from “The Girl” by Hellberg and Cozi Zuehlsdorf.
Relationships: Dr Carmilla/Loreli
Series: Demon Eyes [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1698556
Comments: 3
Kudos: 9
Collections: Stowaways' Shenanigans





	That Time Forgot

Their songs are the only thing Carmilla gets to keep. 

She doesn’t remember the taste of Loreli’s lips on hers until she lets out that perfect note. She still has the scar on her pinkie from where they made their promise years ago, but the blood the two of them shared has long since dried. It is an empty symbol, on an empty body. 

All the clothes they patched up together have unraveled. The last hand me down shirt that she handed even further down to Carmilla is nothing more than a single thread she wears as a ring, and she knows, deep down, that it’s a string she added in another vain attempt to keep Loreli’s memory alive. The necklace with the butterfly charm they’d found in the rubble after a bombing run that Carmilla argued was worth a pretty penny, might feed them for a week but Loreli had said looked better around her neck was melted into slag she’d been forced to leave behind when hunger was more imminent than memories. The words they’d scribbled on walls when no one was looking were washed away by time, if she hadn’t demolished them in her grief. 

So much of what she’s lost over the eons is her fault. She loves too fiercely, holds too tightly, and when she‘s scared, she breaks what she wants to keep so nobody else can take it away. She looks for a cure, hunts for better, less painful ways to feed, but it’s a habit by now. It’s who she is. The monster who is sorry, so sorry, who is trying so hard to be good— not even good, just better— but breaks everything she touches. She’s read more stories than she can count, and she cries at funeral scenes every time. The love is so fleeting, so fragile, but the grief is forever.

The scars that cross her body stay, but every inch of her flesh has been flayed, burned, broken, and then regrown the same as before. The pinprick she gave Carmilla is gone. The mark on her skin now is a cruel mockery of what they used to have. Nothing scars now. She is untouchable, and the promise they made is long since shattered. 

Forever. 

She read about the traditions of a certain culture on a certain planet, once, and the phrase, till death do us part, rises to the forefront of her mind. It’s an equivalent ceremony, the likes of which she’s seen in billions of communities since. There’s variation, of course, there always is, but the promise of eternity is a nigh perpetual theme when it comes to people pronouncing love. She’s loved since Loreli; this void without anyone to hold is an unimaginable hell. But she hasn’t made that promise again.

She is a woman of the stars she watches come to life and die. She’ll stay for years, stay for the whole lives of her transient flames if they will have her, but she doesn’t make promises she can’t keep. They can hold her, but they cannot have her. She will not sing their stories when they will have others to remember them.

Carmilla stares into the mirror. She sees her brown eyes, but she can’t see the warmth that Loreli loved. The lighting in this room behind the stage is perfect, so much better illumination than the flickering bulbs they had to see at when the Sirens sung, and the two of them would try to drown the awful sound out. But she can’t see the beauty Loreli’s lyrics promised was there. Before she died, she’d never seen her reflection truly. All the metal was rusted and the rivers were polluted. They only had each other’s stories, stories Carmilla doesn’t know how to trust without the pound of a time signature behind them. 

Her red hair feels like a cruel joke now. Dark as rust and dried blood. Carmilla thinks she can hear Loreli’s haunting voice now, feel her hands running though the strands, and she starts to hum along to a tune that doesn’t make sense anymore. Carmilla is a harmony without a melody, a duet performed by one. The audience doesn’t see, because this is all they’ve ever known. Even as she plays songs they wrote together, even as lets out the name and memories she keeps buried inside, it doesn’t see. 

But that’s okay, because why should they get to see? Why should they be able to understand, to picture her in all her glory, when Carmilla can’t either?

Everything else is gone.


End file.
